Amazon *didn't* buy the WP. Jeff Bezos did, as an individual. Bezos owns 17% of Amazon, but institutional investors (i.e. Wall Street) own 63%. As usual, Trump gets the details wrong.
The US government self-insures for space launches and satellites. They fly enough of them in total that it is not worth paying a third party to reduce risk.
Your mistake is in not thinking the grid already has lots of storage, in the form of water behind hydroelectric dams and stockpiles of biomass fuels. These currently supply about 10% of US electricity, and nuclear supplies about 20%. There is no reason for them to stop. Electric cars will supply additional storage once they exist in larger numbers.
The US consumes about 4,000 GWh per night in total. That would be 60 million Tesla automobile's worth of capacity. Since we have other sources of night-time power, millions of electric cars would make a significant contribution.
> (tracking panels will produce more, but the cost is higher than the extra energy they will yield
That's no longer true for utility installations, where a single tracker moves a whole row of panels. The daily power output goes up 30%, while the installed cost only goes up 10%, so it is a net win.
A combination of meta-torrents and blockchain methods would eliminate the need for websites entirely.
A meta-torrent is a file which indexes other torrents. Such files already exist. For example, you can download all the magnet links for the Pirate Bay up to a given point in time as a 90 MB torrent. Since new torrents come out all the time, a blockchain would be useful here. Blocks are verified by a hash for each block's contents, and is linked to the previous block. In this case, the contents would be new information about new torrents.
So your local program connects to the torrent network, and starts downloading pieces of the meta-torrent. Once you have it all, you can look up other files to download locally, and add them to your program to get from the network.
We do it with a lot fewer people these days, due to improved productivity. The stuff we import from China is in *addition* to the domestically made stuff.
Launching from a carrier airplane at 10 km altitude approximately doubles the payload compared to the same rocket starting from the ground. The Pegasus rocket launched from an L-1011 airplane showed this. You can watch a SpaceX launch video to understand why. It takes a Falcon 9 about 1 minute to reach 10 km altitude and Mach 1, which is about the conditions for an air-launch. During this time, the first stage consumes about 45% of the fuel it carries. The flight to this point has been more vertical than horizontal. When you are thrusting upwards, it is counter to the Earth's gravity, so the acceleration is less than if you were thrusting horizontally. You are also fighting drag, and the back-pressure of the Earth's atmosphere. When you start at altitude, and oriented mostly horizontal, all these forces reducing your performance are minimized. So the fuel you burn is used more efficiently, resulting in more payload than just the avoided fuel burn from the first stage. The net result is about a doubling of payload.
So what good is this? Airplanes fly many many times, so the cost of the plane is divided by the number of times you fly it. In fact, this airplane recycles parts from two used 747's, so it cost less to build than an entirely new one would. The 500,000 lb of drop mass it can lift can include a reusable first stage rocket, and a fairly small second stage. This would reduce the throw-away hardware for each flight dramatically.
The first version of this plane will be carrying new Pegasus rockets, like the old L-1011 did. I think that's because Paul Allen has put limited amounts of his money into this project. Once they get the plane working, the next step would be to develop the rocket stage. It's possible they would look for outside funding or partners for that part. From a business standpoint, their problem is the airplane part took so long to develop, that they have two serious competitors already building reusable rockets (SpaceX and Blue Origin). A carrier plane has some advantages over a fixed launch site, like being able to avoid bad weather, and a wider range of launch times and inclinations. It can also serve other markets, like oversize cargo delivery. But I see it as a "come from behind" situation for space launch.
That's not the real reason. Central banks inflate because it devalues their government's debt. It allows governments to spend more than they collect in taxes. This is politically favored, because people hate taxes, but mostly don't understand national debts and inflation.
> This means that is to everybody's advantage to hoard currency, since it gets more valuable the longer you hold onto it
Except in the real world, most people have to spend most of their income for necessities (food, shelter, utilities, etc.) regardless if the currency is inflating or deflating. There is also no point in hoarding cash if you can earn a better return from investing. Savvy investors calculate the "real return" on their investments, which is nominal return minus inflation. If inflation is negative (deflation), it doesn't change the formula, only the value you are subtracting from positive to negative. You can still find a real rate of return.
> Unlike Coca-Cola, there's nothing tangible behind any of it
That's not right. Bitcoins are just numerical entries in a secure transaction ledger (the blockchain). They have no more value in themselves than entries in a spreadsheet. What gives them value is the usefulness of the network, which enables sending financial value to anyone in the world. The network includes custom hardware, nodes that relay transactions, user software, exchanges that let you convert bitcoin balances to local currencies, etc. All of them are quite real, and without them, bitcoins would be useless, and therefore only have curiosity value (which is all they had at first, before the network grew enough).
It's not quite a circle, but there are stores on three sides, and free-standing restaurants and banks on the side facing the street, with gaps for cars to get in and out of the main parking lot.
You don't need a magnetosphere if you build a dome around the whole planet.
Earth-normal pressure on Mars is sufficient to float 25 tons of stuff per square meter. For quartz-type glass, that's a ten meter thick layer. That's more than enough to keep the air from escaping.
Fortunately, we don't have to build it all at once. Build a habitat dome for your Mars colony. Extend it a little at a time as needed. Build more domes for other colonies. Eventually the domes merge and you have the whole planet covered. But you don't build more than you need at any point in time.
A dome will warm the space under it via the greenhouse effect, because it actually *is* a greenhouse, literally. The right type of glass, or a filter, will slow the infrared heat loss.
The half-life of the Martian atmosphere is about 500 million years. We can create an artificial magnetosphere by reducing the iron oxide that makes Mars red to iron, making magnets out of it, and pointing them all in the same direction. We can also run superconducting cables along lines of latitude, or position such cables "upwind" of Mars to deflect the Solar wind.
But all this talk of terraforming is premature. Nobody needs to terraform Mars until there are millions of people living there. Until then, we only need to terraform the space under our habitat domes. By the time we get serious about the whole planet, there may be a better answer.
> Mars is kind of like that - it's the next easiest hop from the moon,
That's an outdated view of the Solar System. Near Earth Asteroids, of which 16,000 have been discovered since the year 2000 ( https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/sta... ) are easier to reach than the Moon. Near Mars Asteroids, which includes the inner edge of the Asteroid Belt, which Mars' orbit skims, are easier to reach than Mars. You can include Mars' moons Phobos and Deimos in the asteroid group.
In both cases, this is because the asteroids are not at the bottom of a gravity well, and therefore don't require high thrust chemical fuel to reach. Electric propulsion is ten times as fuel-efficient, so you need much less of it. Also, for the Near Earth group, you can use the Moon for a gravity assist to get to them. You can't use the Moon that way when you are landing on it.
Since some asteroids contain easily extracted fuel and other useful materials, they can be stepping stones (literally) to other destinations, including the Moon and Mars
One approach is to have "delivery points" spaced about two blocks apart. These can be in stores (preferably ones with late hours), or street-accessible boxes. Packages are left at the delivery points, rather than to every individual's door. This worked well when I lived in an apartment complex. Packages were delivered to the office, not to every apartment, so the delivery trucks weren't cluttering up the streets. In fact, they had dedicated parking spots at the office for deliveries.
If the trucks are dropping multiple items at a delivery point, they are spending less total time on the street, and it's not out of your way to pick up on the way home. Bonus points if the delivery point is a pizza place or restaurant that already does home delivery. For a bit extra they can bring the package to your door, if you are lazy, because they are already set up for it.
Here in Atlanta, the nearby enclosed mall *did* die. It's now warehouses and a film studio. However the large regional "inverted" shopping center (parking in the middle, stores on the perimeter) is doing well. This reflects the change in people's shopping habits. Rather than spending a day wandering an enclosed mall, lugging stuff from store to store, people would rather drive right to the stores they want to visit, load stuff in their car, then move to the next. Less carrying, and faster.
This is all part of the same trend that online shopping and the success of of super-centers reflects. People don't have as much time to shop, so they want to do it faster and more conveniently.
No, but it is 51% of the transaction validation hardware, from which you earn block rewards and transaction fees. The rewards and fees are denominated in bitcoins, so it is in your self-interest to keep the value of a bitcoin high. Fucking around with the transaction history would destroy people's confidence in bitcoin, and they would flee for something else. Demand would drop, and so would the market price. Your expensive farm full of ASIC chips, which can do nothing but bitcoin hashing, is now earning tokens of no value.
The easiest way to get up around 32% efficiency is to stop using semiconductors and use concentrated sunlight to drive a turbine instead. Glass mirrors are fairly cheap per square meter.
Solar concentrators don't work for residential solar, because of the need to track the Sun. But utility-scale solar panel farms beat residential by 2.5x on cost anyway. The panels cost the same in both cases, but all the other costs are much lower for a solar farm when you install them at ground level by the hundred thousand, than on a home rooftop by the dozen. Rooftop solar is nice to have, but not really cost-effective.
This bill fails the first amendment, in that one person can restrain another's speech. There are already laws about fraud, libel, and slander, which cover malicious speech, but nothing allows restraining merely "out of date" speech.
> And having a penny would make me the richest person on Mars.
Then the Curiosity rover already took the top spot, because they included a Lincoln penny in the camera reference target. Why a penny? It doesn't weigh much, copper isn't expected to degrade in the Mars environment, and they know what it looks like. There are also color patches and grids of black and white lines. The point of the reference target is to calibrate the cameras with known objects, so they can tell the actual colors of the Mars environment, despite lighting changes as the Sun moves, and the occasional dust storm and cloud.
Indeed. Here in Atlanta we have a number of studios now, including Pinewood Atlanta, where several of the Marvel universe films were/are being made (Infinity War just started filming).
No, turnout was down because Trump's core supporters are poor rural voters who can't afford a D.C. hotel or even find it on a map. The women's march the next day, on the other hand, had more liberal voters, who earn more money on average and are better educated, and the march had better entertainment. So they had twice the turnout.
Slashdot Mirror
Amazon *didn't* buy the WP. Jeff Bezos did, as an individual. Bezos owns 17% of Amazon, but institutional investors (i.e. Wall Street) own 63%. As usual, Trump gets the details wrong.
The US government self-insures for space launches and satellites. They fly enough of them in total that it is not worth paying a third party to reduce risk.
Your mistake is in not thinking the grid already has lots of storage, in the form of water behind hydroelectric dams and stockpiles of biomass fuels. These currently supply about 10% of US electricity, and nuclear supplies about 20%. There is no reason for them to stop. Electric cars will supply additional storage once they exist in larger numbers.
The US consumes about 4,000 GWh per night in total. That would be 60 million Tesla automobile's worth of capacity. Since we have other sources of night-time power, millions of electric cars would make a significant contribution.
> (tracking panels will produce more, but the cost is higher than the extra energy they will yield
That's no longer true for utility installations, where a single tracker moves a whole row of panels. The daily power output goes up 30%, while the installed cost only goes up 10%, so it is a net win.
The federal investment and production tax credits for renewables are scheduled to phase out in the next 5 years, so you got your wish.
A combination of meta-torrents and blockchain methods would eliminate the need for websites entirely.
A meta-torrent is a file which indexes other torrents. Such files already exist. For example, you can download all the magnet links for the Pirate Bay up to a given point in time as a 90 MB torrent. Since new torrents come out all the time, a blockchain would be useful here. Blocks are verified by a hash for each block's contents, and is linked to the previous block. In this case, the contents would be new information about new torrents.
So your local program connects to the torrent network, and starts downloading pieces of the meta-torrent. Once you have it all, you can look up other files to download locally, and add them to your program to get from the network.
> That's interesting considering that we outsourced most of our manufacturing to China.
This is an incorrect urban legend. The US produces about as much as it ever has:
https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-k2F...
We do it with a lot fewer people these days, due to improved productivity. The stuff we import from China is in *addition* to the domestically made stuff.
> I'm not a rocket scientist. What am I missing here?
It so happens I am - see my space systems engineering book for proof ( http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/S... )
Launching from a carrier airplane at 10 km altitude approximately doubles the payload compared to the same rocket starting from the ground. The Pegasus rocket launched from an L-1011 airplane showed this. You can watch a SpaceX launch video to understand why. It takes a Falcon 9 about 1 minute to reach 10 km altitude and Mach 1, which is about the conditions for an air-launch. During this time, the first stage consumes about 45% of the fuel it carries. The flight to this point has been more vertical than horizontal. When you are thrusting upwards, it is counter to the Earth's gravity, so the acceleration is less than if you were thrusting horizontally. You are also fighting drag, and the back-pressure of the Earth's atmosphere. When you start at altitude, and oriented mostly horizontal, all these forces reducing your performance are minimized. So the fuel you burn is used more efficiently, resulting in more payload than just the avoided fuel burn from the first stage. The net result is about a doubling of payload.
So what good is this? Airplanes fly many many times, so the cost of the plane is divided by the number of times you fly it. In fact, this airplane recycles parts from two used 747's, so it cost less to build than an entirely new one would. The 500,000 lb of drop mass it can lift can include a reusable first stage rocket, and a fairly small second stage. This would reduce the throw-away hardware for each flight dramatically.
The first version of this plane will be carrying new Pegasus rockets, like the old L-1011 did. I think that's because Paul Allen has put limited amounts of his money into this project. Once they get the plane working, the next step would be to develop the rocket stage. It's possible they would look for outside funding or partners for that part. From a business standpoint, their problem is the airplane part took so long to develop, that they have two serious competitors already building reusable rockets (SpaceX and Blue Origin). A carrier plane has some advantages over a fixed launch site, like being able to avoid bad weather, and a wider range of launch times and inclinations. It can also serve other markets, like oversize cargo delivery. But I see it as a "come from behind" situation for space launch.
That's not the real reason. Central banks inflate because it devalues their government's debt. It allows governments to spend more than they collect in taxes. This is politically favored, because people hate taxes, but mostly don't understand national debts and inflation.
> This means that is to everybody's advantage to hoard currency, since it gets more valuable the longer you hold onto it
Except in the real world, most people have to spend most of their income for necessities (food, shelter, utilities, etc.) regardless if the currency is inflating or deflating. There is also no point in hoarding cash if you can earn a better return from investing. Savvy investors calculate the "real return" on their investments, which is nominal return minus inflation. If inflation is negative (deflation), it doesn't change the formula, only the value you are subtracting from positive to negative. You can still find a real rate of return.
> Unlike Coca-Cola, there's nothing tangible behind any of it
That's not right. Bitcoins are just numerical entries in a secure transaction ledger (the blockchain). They have no more value in themselves than entries in a spreadsheet. What gives them value is the usefulness of the network, which enables sending financial value to anyone in the world. The network includes custom hardware, nodes that relay transactions, user software, exchanges that let you convert bitcoin balances to local currencies, etc. All of them are quite real, and without them, bitcoins would be useless, and therefore only have curiosity value (which is all they had at first, before the network grew enough).
It's not quite a circle, but there are stores on three sides, and free-standing restaurants and banks on the side facing the street, with gaps for cars to get in and out of the main parking lot.
You don't need a magnetosphere if you build a dome around the whole planet.
Earth-normal pressure on Mars is sufficient to float 25 tons of stuff per square meter. For quartz-type glass, that's a ten meter thick layer. That's more than enough to keep the air from escaping.
Fortunately, we don't have to build it all at once. Build a habitat dome for your Mars colony. Extend it a little at a time as needed. Build more domes for other colonies. Eventually the domes merge and you have the whole planet covered. But you don't build more than you need at any point in time.
A dome will warm the space under it via the greenhouse effect, because it actually *is* a greenhouse, literally. The right type of glass, or a filter, will slow the infrared heat loss.
The half-life of the Martian atmosphere is about 500 million years. We can create an artificial magnetosphere by reducing the iron oxide that makes Mars red to iron, making magnets out of it, and pointing them all in the same direction. We can also run superconducting cables along lines of latitude, or position such cables "upwind" of Mars to deflect the Solar wind.
But all this talk of terraforming is premature. Nobody needs to terraform Mars until there are millions of people living there. Until then, we only need to terraform the space under our habitat domes. By the time we get serious about the whole planet, there may be a better answer.
> Mars is kind of like that - it's the next easiest hop from the moon,
That's an outdated view of the Solar System. Near Earth Asteroids, of which 16,000 have been discovered since the year 2000 ( https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/sta... ) are easier to reach than the Moon. Near Mars Asteroids, which includes the inner edge of the Asteroid Belt, which Mars' orbit skims, are easier to reach than Mars. You can include Mars' moons Phobos and Deimos in the asteroid group.
In both cases, this is because the asteroids are not at the bottom of a gravity well, and therefore don't require high thrust chemical fuel to reach. Electric propulsion is ten times as fuel-efficient, so you need much less of it. Also, for the Near Earth group, you can use the Moon for a gravity assist to get to them. You can't use the Moon that way when you are landing on it.
Since some asteroids contain easily extracted fuel and other useful materials, they can be stepping stones (literally) to other destinations, including the Moon and Mars
One approach is to have "delivery points" spaced about two blocks apart. These can be in stores (preferably ones with late hours), or street-accessible boxes. Packages are left at the delivery points, rather than to every individual's door. This worked well when I lived in an apartment complex. Packages were delivered to the office, not to every apartment, so the delivery trucks weren't cluttering up the streets. In fact, they had dedicated parking spots at the office for deliveries.
If the trucks are dropping multiple items at a delivery point, they are spending less total time on the street, and it's not out of your way to pick up on the way home. Bonus points if the delivery point is a pizza place or restaurant that already does home delivery. For a bit extra they can bring the package to your door, if you are lazy, because they are already set up for it.
> Huge malls need to die.
Here in Atlanta, the nearby enclosed mall *did* die. It's now warehouses and a film studio. However the large regional "inverted" shopping center (parking in the middle, stores on the perimeter) is doing well. This reflects the change in people's shopping habits. Rather than spending a day wandering an enclosed mall, lugging stuff from store to store, people would rather drive right to the stores they want to visit, load stuff in their car, then move to the next. Less carrying, and faster.
This is all part of the same trend that online shopping and the success of of super-centers reflects. People don't have as much time to shop, so they want to do it faster and more conveniently.
> They don't seem able to accept that there is a good reason for restricting fishing.
Restricting fishing is an inevitability. Either government quotas will do it, or lack of fish will do it. Either way, their way of life is doomed.
No, but it is 51% of the transaction validation hardware, from which you earn block rewards and transaction fees. The rewards and fees are denominated in bitcoins, so it is in your self-interest to keep the value of a bitcoin high. Fucking around with the transaction history would destroy people's confidence in bitcoin, and they would flee for something else. Demand would drop, and so would the market price. Your expensive farm full of ASIC chips, which can do nothing but bitcoin hashing, is now earning tokens of no value.
The easiest way to get up around 32% efficiency is to stop using semiconductors and use concentrated sunlight to drive a turbine instead. Glass mirrors are fairly cheap per square meter.
Solar concentrators don't work for residential solar, because of the need to track the Sun. But utility-scale solar panel farms beat residential by 2.5x on cost anyway. The panels cost the same in both cases, but all the other costs are much lower for a solar farm when you install them at ground level by the hundred thousand, than on a home rooftop by the dozen. Rooftop solar is nice to have, but not really cost-effective.
This bill fails the first amendment, in that one person can restrain another's speech. There are already laws about fraud, libel, and slander, which cover malicious speech, but nothing allows restraining merely "out of date" speech.
> And having a penny would make me the richest person on Mars.
Then the Curiosity rover already took the top spot, because they included a Lincoln penny in the camera reference target. Why a penny? It doesn't weigh much, copper isn't expected to degrade in the Mars environment, and they know what it looks like. There are also color patches and grids of black and white lines. The point of the reference target is to calibrate the cameras with known objects, so they can tell the actual colors of the Mars environment, despite lighting changes as the Sun moves, and the occasional dust storm and cloud.
The Winklevoss twins bought a lot of bitcoins when they were worth much less than today. I'm sure they can cope.
Indeed. Here in Atlanta we have a number of studios now, including Pinewood Atlanta, where several of the Marvel universe films were/are being made (Infinity War just started filming).
No, turnout was down because Trump's core supporters are poor rural voters who can't afford a D.C. hotel or even find it on a map. The women's march the next day, on the other hand, had more liberal voters, who earn more money on average and are better educated, and the march had better entertainment. So they had twice the turnout.